Yuka Kurita

Born in 1990 in Yamagata, Japan, and now based in Sendai, visual artist and illustrator Yuka Kurita has built a practice anchored, in her own words, in "organic forms and vivid colours," through which she continues to explore a worldview entirely her own.

A 2013 graduate of the Graphic Design department at Tohoku University of Art and Design—where her graduation work earned the Department Grand Prize—Kurita took an unconventional route into illustration, spending time at an IT company and working as a street-dance instructor before professor Shunsuke Sawaguchi introduced her to UNIZON, the advertising production company where she works today. As a member of its creative team, she produces illustrations for posters, packaging and advertising visuals, and has for several years created the poster imagery for the Sendai Aoba Festival. Among the projects closest to her heart are her visuals for the Tohoku-Miyagi Reconstruction Marathon—an event whose full distance she went on to run herself.

Alongside her commercial work, Kurita has become a sought-after cover artist, illustrating the front of the literary magazine Gunzo and NHK's radio textbook Enjoy Simple English. The turning point, she notes, came with her Silver Award at the 19th TIS Open Recruitment in 2024, after which commissions began arriving from those who had seen her work. That recognition has only grown: in 2025 she received a Bronze Award at the 20th TIS Open Recruitment and a Gold Medal at the Society of Illustrators 68 Annual in New York, followed by a shortlist place in Communication Arts' 2026 Illustration competition.

Her solo exhibitions have travelled from The Artcomplex Center of Tokyo (2014) to Galerie Martin Mertens in Berlin ("Salmon of fillet," 2018), and in 2025 she presented "Salmon Fillet" at Yumeno Gallery Kichijoji and "Shissô" at CAFE deux poissons in Tokyo. Her work has also appeared in group exhibitions including "Two Truths" at London's Griffin Gallery and the Society of Illustrators 68 Annual Exhibition in New York.

Kurita now works almost entirely digitally, scanning the textures of watercolour, paint and coarse paper to fuse with her digital drawing—a deliberate embrace of handcraft, she explains, precisely in an age when AI evolves by the day. Her involvement in UNIZON's film production has sharpened her feel for movement, leading her to compose single images that quietly suggest a story. What she cherishes most is the moment her pictures, joined with lettering and design, begin to "take on a social quality"—the instant a drawing connects with society. These days, she admits, there is perhaps "no day without drawing."